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 Post subject: Re: philosophy Thread (political and otherwise)
PostPosted: Sun March 18, 2018 6:21 am 
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 Post subject: Re: philosophy Thread (political and otherwise)
PostPosted: Sun March 18, 2018 6:22 am 
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Leatherhead wrote:
What's the world like? The real world, behind existence as we know it. For existence as we know it is really just a sort of illusion, a necessary illusion built upon necessary conditions of human experience.

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 Post subject: Re: philosophy Thread (political and otherwise)
PostPosted: Mon March 19, 2018 4:50 am 
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BurtReynolds wrote:
simple schoolboy wrote:
Too much egoism, not enough Hoppean Snake memes.

this one seems relevant

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Apparently "spooks" is problematic, as that may be used as an anti-black slur. I wonder when the last time "spook" was used in that manner. Doesn't seem very contemporary. Maybe All Quiet on the Western Front? Those Gerries didn't much like the French African troops.


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 Post subject: Re: philosophy Thread (political and otherwise)
PostPosted: Mon March 19, 2018 5:23 am 
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I posted on a Facebook group that was something was a spook and got banned for it lol

or at least I assume that was why I got banned.

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 Post subject: Re: philosophy Thread (political and otherwise)
PostPosted: Mon March 19, 2018 5:26 am 
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I'm on a big Peterson kick today...

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 Post subject: Re: philosophy Thread (political and otherwise)
PostPosted: Mon March 19, 2018 9:22 am 
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BurtReynolds wrote:
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Is striving really suffering though? I think Camus would say otherwise.

Struggle can often be pleasurable, at least when you are making progress.

But I prefer Doritos.

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 Post subject: Re: philosophy Thread (political and otherwise)
PostPosted: Tue March 20, 2018 12:03 am 
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Yeah well Camus can do, but Sartre is smartre


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 Post subject: Re: philosophy Thread (political and otherwise)
PostPosted: Tue March 20, 2018 12:27 am 
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bart wrote:
Yeah well Camus can do, but Sartre is smartre

Yeah well Scooby Doo can doo-doo, but Jimmy Carter is smarter.


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 Post subject: Re: philosophy Thread (political and otherwise)
PostPosted: Wed April 04, 2018 10:44 pm 
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https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... language/#

How Morality Changes in a Foreign Language

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 Post subject: Re: philosophy Thread (political and otherwise)
PostPosted: Thu April 05, 2018 4:29 am 
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BurtReynolds wrote:
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Fantastic.


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 Post subject: Re: philosophy Thread (political and otherwise)
PostPosted: Sat April 14, 2018 4:03 am 
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 Post subject: Re: philosophy Thread (political and otherwise)
PostPosted: Thu April 26, 2018 4:16 am 
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 Post subject: Re: philosophy Thread (political and otherwise)
PostPosted: Thu April 26, 2018 9:23 am 
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They say pity the country without heroes.....I think, more accurately, its, 'pity the country the needs heroes.'


We need some fucking heroes.

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 Post subject: Re: Pedantic Struggles: The All Encompassing Philosophy Thre
PostPosted: Fri May 04, 2018 7:06 am 
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Collectivism in all its forms is the single greatest evil in the universe.

Spoiler: show
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 Post subject: Re: Pedantic Struggles: The All Encompassing Philosophy Thre
PostPosted: Sun May 13, 2018 10:00 am 
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Even if he is a crazy wizard man, I enjoy a lot of Alan Moore's thoughts, if not his comics. He said some interesting stuff about the origination of the words "art" and "spelling" (emphasis on "spell") before, but I'll have to dig it up. Etymology is underrated by modern people I think.


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 Post subject: Re: Pedantic Struggles: The All Encompassing Philosophy Thre
PostPosted: Sun May 20, 2018 10:02 am 
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Pretty cool debate, with your favorite and mine... Starts around 9:30



Stephen Fry is a dreamboat. Humor goes a long way.

https://www.munkdebates.com/The-Debates ... orrectness

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 Post subject: Re: Pedantic Struggles: The All Encompassing Philosophy Thre
PostPosted: Mon May 21, 2018 6:04 am 
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BurtReynolds wrote:
Collectivism in all its forms is the single greatest evil in the universe.

Spoiler: show
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the same arguments against socialism and communism, as to why failure is inherent, holds true for American capitalism.


They all require massive gov't intervention-socialism/communism/capitalism- to continue their existence.....

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 Post subject: Re: Pedantic Struggles: The All Encompassing Philosophy Thre
PostPosted: Mon May 21, 2018 7:41 pm 
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Noangel wrote:
BurtReynolds wrote:
Collectivism in all its forms is the single greatest evil in the universe.

Spoiler: show
Image

the same arguments against socialism and communism, as to why failure is inherent, holds true for American capitalism.


They all require massive gov't intervention-socialism/communism/capitalism- to continue their existence.....

Hmm. Massive government intervention kinda sounds like the opposite of capitalism.

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 Post subject: Re: Pedantic Struggles: The All Encompassing Philosophy Thre
PostPosted: Wed May 23, 2018 9:27 pm 
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https://areomagazine.com/2018/02/28/che ... elativism/

John Rawls wrote:
“Imagine you are designing the world and all of its social and cultural landscapes. You are doing so from an original position of assumed equality (‘all men/persons are created equal’), giving the thought experiment its name. In this world, according to your designs, some people may be advantaged while others will be relatively disadvantaged, or they will not be. That’s up to you. You can make the world however you would like, but there’s a catch: before you enter this world, you will be given no foreknowledge of who you will be within it. Rawls called this assumption a veil of ignorance and posited that it is a worthy method of determining the morality of social and political issues. So, if you design a world rife with injustices, you have no way to guarantee that you’ll be on the better side of those. Given these constraints, who would design a world that is profoundly unjust? The answer is surely no one who understands the constraints of the thought experiment.”

Quote:
The point of Rawls’ thought experiment is straightforward. No one would knowingly design a world in which they could, by mere accident of birth, come out on the short end of the privilege stick. While those who understand human psychology and the operations of society may design a world containing inequalities, it’s unlikely many would design a world that generates those inequalities for fundamentally arbitrary reasons, such as racial or mere sexual or gender identity. That is, Rawls put forth an extremely compelling way to think about systemic inequalities and injustices in society and why there is a bedrock imperative to minimize and ultimately eradicate arbitrary social inequalities like those that arise from racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry. This is, in essence, the heart of gold at the center of social and cultural progressivism (upon which economic progressivism partially rests): progressivism is in essence the noble ambition to minimize or eradicate arbitrary unfairness of opportunity, including discrimination, bigotry, disenfranchisement, and all forms that stack the deck in the favor of some and against others over mere accidents of birth.

Quote:
Progressive thinkers and activists are often familiar with Rawls’ “original position” thought experiment and readily embrace it and its obvious point. It is perhaps ironic, then, that many of these thinkers are also moral and cultural relativists who believe that no one culture possesses the kind of moral perspective needed to judge others and evaluate them ethically. Though there are many examples available to draw upon, by far the most egregious and pressing arises from Western progressives who, on the basis of claims about Western interference throughout the rest of the world, defend profoundly illiberal and regressive societies with values rooted in Islam. These include, for example, Western feminists who ascribe a myriad of evils to some ill-defined concept called “Patriarchy,” which requires much tortuous analysis and paranoid motivated reasoning to discover throughout the West, and yet defend the literal, explicit, and measurable patriarchy that truly dominates and oppresses women in Islamist societies. What is the reasoning behind this inexcusable inconsistency? It is the idea that we can’t criticize those cultures, their beliefs, or their practices, because this is to assert our cultural values over theirs, which is yet another form of oppressive colonialism and imperialism being foisted upon a (presumed racial) culture we have historically oppressed.

Quote:
Surely it is clear that with only the smallest modification, Rawls’ famous thought experiment bulldozes not only the landscape that props up arbitrary societal privilege but also moral and cultural relativism besides?

Imagine you are designing the world and all of its social and cultural landscapes. In this world, according to your designs, some people will subscribe to this culture or that, and their values will flow from whatever cultural precepts bind them as moral communities. These may be scriptural, doctrinal, contemporary Enlightenment liberal, or whatever else. They can take various political, governing, and economic systems as their bases. They can depend upon whatever means of adjudicating upon disputes and executing upon those judgments. You can design the cultural landscape of the world however you would like, but there’s a catch: before you enter this world, you will be given no foreknowledge of which culture you’ll be a part of within it or who you will be in that culture. And aren’t the points obvious now?

If you design a world that contains a culture that hurls homosexuals from rooftops in accordance with the alleged will of God and considers this justice, you may very well find yourself a homosexual in that culture (or a concerned ally watching it from afar). If you design a world that favors and protects witch doctors or other forms of primitive medicine alongside others in which modern Western medicine exists, you may tragically come into this world a patient of a treatable cancer condemned to suffer and die unnecessarily from it despite all the magic your people believe in. If you design a world in which brutal dictators cannot be judged to be doing wrongly (so long as they’re not acting imperialistically), you may find yourself one of their subjects — which is to say one of their prisoners. If you design a world in which moral relativism is an ethical imperative, you may find yourself desperate to escape oppression while your freer brothers and sisters in more Enlightened regions argue that your oppression cannot be criticized because it is cultural thus beyond external reproach.

Quote:
The lesson of Rawls’ thought experiment reaches beyond a mere call for social justice, and it is utterly straightforward: cultural relativism is a fraudulent doctrine. Some moral systems are objectively better than others, if the word “better” means anything at all.


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 Post subject: Re: Pedantic Struggles: The All Encompassing Philosophy Thre
PostPosted: Thu May 24, 2018 9:22 am 
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Never heard of Rawls. I'll have to check him out.


This generally sums up my feelings against collectivism and why its responsible for most of history's great atrocities:

https://www.theobjectivestandard.com/is ... lectivism/

Quote:
Individualism is the idea that the individual’s life belongs to him and that he has an inalienable right to live it as he sees fit, to act on his own judgment, to keep and use the product of his effort, and to pursue the values of his choosing. It’s the idea that the individual is sovereign, an end in himself, and the fundamental unit of moral concern. This is the ideal that the American Founders set forth and sought to establish when they drafted the Declaration and the Constitution and created a country in which the individual’s rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness were to be recognized and protected.


Quote:
Collectivism is the idea that the individual’s life belongs not to him but to the group or society of which he is merely a part, that he has no rights, and that he must sacrifice his values and goals for the group’s “greater good.” According to collectivism, the group or society is the basic unit of moral concern, and the individual is of value only insofar as he serves the group. As one advocate of this idea puts it: “Man has no rights except those which society permits him to enjoy. From the day of his birth until the day of his death society allows him to enjoy certain so-called rights and deprives him of others; not . . . because society desires especially to favor or oppress the individual, but because its own preservation, welfare, and happiness are the prime considerations.”


Quote:
A beautiful statement of the metaphysical fact of individualism was provided by former slave Frederick Douglass in a letter he wrote to his ex-“master” Thomas Auld after escaping bondage in Maryland and fleeing to New York. “I have often thought I should like to explain to you the grounds upon which I have justified myself in running away from you,” wrote Douglass. “I am almost ashamed to do so now, for by this time you may have discovered them yourself. I will, however, glance at them.” You see, said Douglass,

"I am myself; you are yourself; we are two distinct persons, equal persons. What you are, I am. You are a man, and so am I. God created both, and made us separate beings. I am not by nature bound to you, or you to me. Nature does not make your existence depend upon me, or mine to depend upon yours. I cannot walk upon your legs, or you upon mine. I cannot breathe for you, or you for me; I must breathe for myself, and you for yourself. We are distinct persons, and are each equally provided with faculties necessary to our individual existence. In leaving you, I took nothing but what belonged to me, and in no way lessened your means for obtaining an honest living. Your faculties remained yours, and mine became useful to their rightful owner."

Although one could quibble with the notion that “God” creates people, Douglass’s basic metaphysical point is clearly sound. Human beings are by nature distinct, separate beings, each with his own body and his own faculties necessary to his own existence. Human beings are not in any way metaphysically attached or dependent on one another; each must use his own mind and direct his own body; no one else can do either for him. People are individuals. “I am myself; you are yourself; we are two distinct persons.”

The individual is metaphysically real; he exists in and of himself; he is the basic unit of human life. Groups or collectives of people—whether families, partnerships, communities, or societies—are not metaphysically real; they do not exist in and of themselves; they are not fundamental units of human life. Rather, they are some number of individuals. This is perceptually self-evident. We can see that it is true.

Who says otherwise? Collectivists do. John Dewey, a father of pragmatism and modern “liberalism,” explains the collectivist notion as follows:

"Society in its unified and structural character is the fact of the case; the non-social individual is an abstraction arrived at by imagining what man would be if all his human qualities were taken away. Society, as a real whole, is the normal order, and the mass as an aggregate of isolated units is the fiction."

According to collectivism, the group or society is metaphysically real—and the individual is a mere abstraction, a fiction.

This, of course, is ridiculous, but there you have it. On the metaphysics of collectivism, you and I (and Mr. Douglass) are fictional, and we become real only insofar as we somehow interrelate with society. As to exactly how we must interrelate with the collective in order to become part of the “real whole,” we’ll hear about that shortly.

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